Big Pizza: Calorie-Count Menu Boards Make No Sense For Our Product

With the FDA still fiddling with rule changes that require chain restaurants to post calorie information for the products on their in-store menu, the country’s largest pizza chains have stopped fighting each other and banded together to fight federal regulators.

The American Pizza Community — which sounds like it could be the name of a really awesome prog-rock band — is a joint creation of Domino’s, Papa John’s, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut and others. It formed in January to make the argument to the folks in Washington that the world of pizza is too expansive to fit into the strict requirements of the menu boards.

The group argues that since pizzas generally come in multiple sizes and with a wide variety of toppings, it would require menu boards that would be larger than the menu.

The FDA proposal does allow restaurants to provide a calorie range for customizable items, but there could be a calorie swing of more than a thousand calories for people who load up on extra cheese and meats.

The Pizza Community also takes issue with the FDA requirement to list calories for an entire pie. According to the group, people only eat around 2.1 slices on average.

Reiterating arguments made last year by Domino’s CEO J. Patrick Doyle, the crust coalition claims that 90% of its orders are placed online or over the phone, meaning an overwhelming majority of customers would never even see the menu boards.

A D.C.-area Domino’s franchisee tells the Washington Post that she has had menu boards up in 10 of her Maryland stores and discerned no change in buying habits.

“I don’t see pizza counts dropping, and I don’t see salads running out the door,” she tells the Washington Post.

A rep for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has supported many menu labeling initiatives, tells the Post that there is nothing special about the pizza business.

“We heard the same types of arguments from the whole restaurant industry when they were opposing menu labeling in the early days,” she explains. “I don’t know what’s up with the pizza industry.”

They could also break it down into components and match that to pizza sizes and have a nice grid. The result would allow an interested party to see that adding pepperoni to the medium pizza also ads 70 calories a slice.

I only eat two pieces, but I don’t have them slice the pizzas at all.
Of course, this was back in the day when Little Caesar’s sold a long paper-wrapped cardboard tray with 2 full-sized pizzas side by side. (and crazy bread *drools*)

Bravo, you eat at local mom and pop pizza shops. Thanks for pointing that out to the rest of us, let us bask in your foodie superiority.

Obviously plenty of people consider what these chains sell to be pizza, since they are all over the goddamn country and have managed to stay in and grow their business for decades. But don’t let that stop you from thumbing your nose at everyone else.

You’re confusing a convenient, easy to find, pizza-shaped object with actual pizza. Kind of like people confusing what McDonald’s sells with actual hamburgers. They’re both cheap and convenient, so they sell well. But that doesn’t make them real food.

It is food. Of course its not particularly good, all natural or nutritious doesn’t mean it’s not food. Obviously a local restaurant’s hamburger is better than a Big Mac, a sandwich you make at home is better than Quizno’s or my mothers lasagna is better than anything served at Olive Garden, but this elitist ideology of “big chains don’t serve authentic/and or unprocessed pizza/burgers/chinese food/etc” is getting old. It’s great that you choose to frequent local restaurants or even better, make everything from scratch at home. Fantastic. But here is a news flash: unless you grew or butchered whatever it is you eat, then you better believe it’s just as processed and pumped up with shit as the cardboard they serve you at Domino’s.

“Reiterating arguments made last year by Domino’s CEO J. Patrick Doyle, the crust coalition claims that 90% of its orders are placed online or over the phone, meaning an overwhelming majority of customers would never even see the menu boards.

A D.C.-area Domino’s franchisee tells the Washington Post that she has had menu boards up in 10 of her Maryland stores and discerned no change in buying habits.”

If that is the case, why oppose the regulation? It will almost certainly cost more to oppose it than to simply put up a board on the wall of the take-out place.

When I buy pizza these days, I typically don’t interact with my local franchise. I interact directly with the mother ship. THAT is most certainly an inter state transaction.

Making rules about actual menus in stores? That’s a bit quaint really.

Although if you have the ingredient information already, creating a suitable ingredient matrix and printing it is pretty trivial. Give the job to a summer intern. You will spend far less than trying to fight it.

If anything, this is to prevent wider awareness of how much nutritional impact there is in a single slice of pizza. People might realize what gluttonous pigs they are and ease up a little.

The Corporate Food Machine can’t have people making sensible healthy choices.

Exactly. As with marketing junk food to children, I’ll never understand why some people are enthusiastic about promoting corporations’ rights to tax breaks, “free speech,” selective disclosure, and any other hands-off policies while proportionally eager to blame individual consumers about their educational deficiencies and poor choices. It’s a perfect example of victim blaming.

Because they’re so privileged by being white/male/educated/salaried (or aspiring to do so) and convinced that government controls/minorities/illegal immigrants are the only barrier to their success. So, they get to be the victim and get an external excuse as to why they’re not as successful as they want to be.

That’s a cop-out. Granted, it’s an old cop-out, and generally well entrenched, but it’s still a cop-out. Congress’ regulatory power over interstate commerce was to prevent individual states from enacting legislation that harmed others when it came to inter-state and international trading. Claiming Commerce Clause when the customer and the location are both local, and nothing is being shipped interstate is disingenuous. This sort of legislation should rightly be done by a sort of “UCC for food”, where states all agree to uphold a common standard.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

— Ninth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

— Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Those two amendments together, combined with Article VI Section 2 mean that yes, every law must be spelled out in the Constitution. Nobody is being “fed” the idea. It’s right there in the text of the document.

By the way, the term you are looking for is “strict constructionist.” If you’re going to label someone, at least try to be accurate.

I take it you are a person who believes the Federal Government should have unlimited power to do as it pleases, including dictating to a local restaurant how to write its menu.

The Constitution enumerates the powers of the Federal Government. In other words, it says “Congress may do A, B or C.” Please offer support for your assertion the Constitution actually means “Congress may do A, B, or C or anything it wants.”

Careful, now. An inaccurate label isn’t going to qualify as an answer.

It is CLEARLY interstate commerce since these companies ALL have units throughout multiple states.. In fact, the law only applies to those companies that have over a specified number of units. This means your mom and pop will not be subject to the labeling.
It also comes from GENERAL WELFARE clause, which also gives power to things like the FDA, USDA, the FCC, the FAA. Of course, I am guessing as a proper libertarian you must be totally against the drug war anything else that is not specified in a document written in the 1700’s when the people who wrote it were all heterosexual white males.

Do you believe the spirit of the law? Because the spirit of the law is to inform the customer, nothing wrong with that. However, if the vast majority of their customers are not ordering in person it makes little sense for a business to have to conform to this law because you are not achieving the stated goal of the law.

There should be exceptions for any business that has XX% or less of it’s business in person. Heck for good will this Pizza coalition could say “we’ll print personalized calorie counts on every box” that would cost the companies a fraction of the price of menu boards and actually achieve the purpose of the law.

It’s not like it would be possible to create a matrix with a row representing each topping and a column representing each pizza size. THAT WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE. MATRICES ARE TIME CONSUMING AND CONFUSING.

Coffee, yours is a strong story, simply told. You have written an eloquent and powerful narrative as a young witness to the matrices atrocities against your father and you have the courage and determination that will enable you to survive and be an eloquent voice for peace and justice as you put your thoughts and experiences down on paper.

In a way, I kind of support the big pizza chains on this. Every pizza slice is different from the next. When you add deep dish, thin crust, or a crazy variety of toppings, the list could go on. If this was required to be visible on an order menu, you would need reading glasses.

Pizza Hut I believe has nutritional info on their website and it’s like reading a book for all the different types of varieties, sizes, toppings and servings. Although more information is helpful, I doubt most of us are counting calories when we order off the menu at Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, McDonalds or Wendy’s.

I don’t know why everyone thinks this. Yes, if I’ve gone to a pizza joint I have resigned myself to eating less healthy than somewhere else, BUT I always use these lists to compare items against others at the same store.

If I was torn between getting 2 different gourmet slices and discovered one is half the calories of the other, it would be extremely helpful to my descision process.

>>What they’ll do is modify the toppings or type of crust that they buy.

Would they? Do most people modify their pizza desires based on calorie count?

My family expects a coupe of pepperoni, mushroom, and ground beef pizzas when I head to the pizza place. If I come back with onion, green pepper, and tofu in order to save calories there will be blood.

I’ll grant you that this isn’t a nutrition board inside the restaurant, but this is a great way to figure out what the hell you’re eating. And when we went there recently for my daughter’s last-day-of-kindergarten celebration, this application actually influenced my order.

Just went to the http://www.cspinet.org/ website, not only are they pushing this nonsense, they are pushing for smaller drink sizes, and stopping marketing of Girl Scout goodies to children. Beginning to not like these guys.

I’ve lost a little over 20 pounds in the past two months. I’ve done it by counting calories. I haven’t stopped going out to restaurants, just by stopping going out to restaurants that don’t list calorie information (with very rare exception for local, non-chain favorites where I’m quite careful what I order). Putting out the calorie information doesn’t stop people who care about calories from eating at your restaurant, to the contrary, it enables us to portion the meal to fit our needs. I don’t see why the pizza industry thinks this will hurt them. It’s information they already have. (Just as I don’t understand why the Cheesecake Factory doesn’t provide nutritonal information online or in all their restaurants, just in restaurants located in areas that mandate it, like Montgomery County, MD mentioned in the linked article.) The burden on these restaurants is minimalâ€“they already have the data.

I’m restricting myself to a weekly calorie amount / composition, which results in an average daily count. If I know I’m going someplace that would put me over for that day, I can compensate on other days by taking in a little less.

When I can’t get a reasonable calorie count from one place, I choose another where I can get the information.

Waiting until you are standing there to order is the wrong time to try and figure out what to eat. Almost every chain has their nutritional info online. Far easier to plan your meal ahead of time, or even order it online. It’s nice to have the info available on a flyer at fast food joints as well. I personally find the numbers on the menu board very distracting. The information should be easily available, not mandated by law onto the menu board.

I have also been counting calories to lose a little weight. I went on a trip recently and was forced to eat out more than normal. You would be surprised at the number of restaurants that DON’T have their nutritional information available online (or those that make it very hard to find). It’s also hard to plan ahead if you’re traveling and don’t know ahead of time what restaurants are even there. I don’t even care if it’s on the menu board, but it would be great if they all at least had a pamphlet in the store.

This would be much easier to do as an App or on a kiosk at the store. As a single page paper with a matrix of dough sizes and ingredient volumes, it would be unwieldy and possibly confusing.

But if you could just run through an app and pick your type of dough and size, sauce (in its various flavors and volumes), and individual toppings, it could relatively easily show you all the nutritional info for a slice and/or whole pie based on what you chose.

Exactly. If they could just have a terminal or two, you could enter what you want to order and it will calculate the calories per slice for you. That should fulfill the regulation without having to build a whole new wall to list all the possible calorie counts, right?

I used to have a teacher in school that when kids complained about a certain assignment or said they needed more time, her response was that if you were offered a million dollars to have it done on time, do you think you could do it. Of course the answer was yes. I’ll use that same argument here. These pizza chains are complaining but I bet if their incentive was that they would pay no taxes for the next 5 years and the CEO would personally get a check for 20 million dollars from the US government, the calorie counts would be up within a week. So I understand why they are fighting it but my response is suck it up and get it done.

As much as I hate Big Brother telling us what to eat, I do think it is reasonable to expect restaurants to have nutrition information available.

If we must this information on the menu boards, how about this: Determine a serving size by weight (i.e., a serving is 4 ounces, no matter what size pizza). For each type of pizza, list the calorie count for one serving with cheese only.

Have printed material handy with nutrition information on toppings. Or have a webpage/app where you can build your pizza and it updates the calorie count each time you add an ingredient, like I have seen on other restaurant websites.

if arby’s can make a build a meal calculator, i don’t see why pizza chains can’t. it would be a little more complicated if a large pizza gets more green peppers than a small, but it could be done.
put it on the website, put a terminal on location that people can use to access the site in store. the cost of menu boards is already pretty outrageous so i doubt a computer would be that much more expensive

The restaurants won’t carry nutritional information unless mandated. Restaurants don’t even provide nutritional content in their locations that are in states that don’t require it, even if they have it available at other locations.

What’s your problem with me as a consumer being able to ask “what is in this thing” and being able to get a real answer?

Putting calories on the board won’t make people eat less. This is just another arrogant attempt by government to control people’s lives.

The calorie counts are readily available on the website. If yo do not have the foresight to do research ahead of time, then your lack of calorie information is of no concern to me. In addition, there is no moral obligation on the part of any restaurant to disclose calories; if you do not like the fact that a given restaurant does not disclose calories you are free to not do business at that restaurant.

Yes it is difficult because the competitive advantage will go to those companies that screw you the hardest. It doesn’t matter if it’s proper food labeling or mandatory arbitration. All corporations will race to the bottom unless something is done to stop them.

Regulation like Law in general provides a nice predictable set of expectations and even playing field for everyone.

You don’t have to put yourself at a disadvantage by not being a total psychopath.

“All corporations will race to the bottom unless something is done to stop them.”

By nature, corporations only exist to serve the interests of the shareholders. The boards have no obligation to act ethically. As a result, unregulated corporations will indeed race to the bottom.

“You can choose not to do business with…” doesn’t work with corporations that have basically infected the population’s bone marrow with public and financial influence. Government regulations are necessary to not only keep corporations in check, but to preserve what we know as the free market; when one is “too big to fail,” then we’re well on the way to oligopolies and monopolies (see: cable and telecommunications in the US).

Just who do you think creates the regulations? Large corporations frequently buy out regulations (regulatory capture) that suit them and hurt their competitors. Small businesses are frequently put at risk by onerous government regulations (lobbied for by larger corporations) that they can’t afford to comply with. Bernie Madoff got away with what he did, in a large part, because there are so many financial regulations that no one could even figure out if he was violating them.

Let’s take restaurant inspection for example. There is no need for these kinds of regulations or bureaucratic oversight in order to ensure safety when eating out at a restaurant.

Why?

1.Killing customers is bad for business. Not only will you not have any repeat customers but word of mouth will spread that your food is dangerous and no one will want to eat at your establishment.

2.The restaurant owners would be liable to the person they injured (or to their family if killed) and would have to pay full restitution to their victims. In a libertarian society, there would be no state-enforced “limited liability” and corporate owners would be fully and personally liable for the actions of their corporation.

3.If a restaurant is grossly negligent in food safety, has a track record of harming people, or harms a lot of people at once, the owners of that restaurant and anyone otherwise complicit would be liable criminally (again, no state-enforced “limited liability”) as they have committed an act of aggression against another’s person through their acts of gross negligence.

Restaurant inspections, as they are now, are little more than revenue generation activities for government where they fine businesses for the most ridiculous of things (e.g food was stored 5.5 feet off the ground instead of 6 or the chicken was 121.5 degrees instead of 122).

The banks are another example. In a libertarian society, the banks would have been allowed to fail. The failure of the banks would act in the place of strict regulation by the government and they would not longer be around to defraud people. Instead, the government used stolen money to bail the banks out and, to make matters worse, did not hold anyone accountable and allowed the CEOs to continue going on with their large salaries and bonuses as if nothing happened.

The CEOs and shareholders of the banks would have then been personally liable for the consequences of their actions and required, if found guilty after due process, to pay recompense to their victims out of their personal money and assets.

“The calorie counts are readily available on the website. If yo do not have the foresight to do research ahead of time, then your lack of calorie information is of no concern to me.”

Your concern with government control is also of no concern to me. Posting calorie counts is no different than opening your kitchen to a health inspector.

Are you aware that many households aren’t equipped with computers (and smartphones) outside of work? What if someone had planned to pick up a pizza, but the consumer’s internet access is temporarily down?

That said, I’m sure corporations are equally annoyed they must make the nutritional info available online.

It becomes a concern when you use the violence of the state to impose your will upon a private property owner who is engaged in a peaceful activity that does not violate your rights to person or property.

There is no requirement to buy pizza from X, Y, or Z pizza place. The owner of the pizza place is minding their own business. They have not committed force against person or property. No one forced you to go there. What’s next? Demanding that KFC reveal it’s 11 secret herbs and spices? Demanding that all restaurants submit their recipes for public inspection?

I think this is a dumb rule to begin with. Especially here there’s way too many variables. I just took a look at a Dominos menu. There’s 9 different possible sizes and crust types, 4 types of sauces to choose from, and 26 different toppings.

What if the pizza isn’t cut into perfectly even shaped slices? Places that use the long blade cutter instead of the old style cutter don’t always do it perfectly even.

“Calorie counts have being proven to have no impact on reducing the number of calories “

Really? Since it has not been mandatory for restaurant chains it is amazing you can make this claim. Cite your sources, or are you just talking about your tiny little world?

“Imagine how unwieldy a menu board listing all the different combinations would be. “

Funny, they seem to have NO PROBLEM making a menu board that can put the prices up for each combination. Here would be an idea.

Pizza with sauce and cheese 1000 calories
additional items
Pepperoni 250
ham 200
double cheese 500
mushrooms 75
etc
You have three columns for each size and presto, you have it. They could easily put their meat lovers and vegetarian and philly cheese pizzas up there as well. This is a lie that is being spread by the morons who spent years selling crappy pizza, then made a commercial that says we are changing.

They did a study after New York enforced calorie information on menus, found no reduction in purchase sizes and in some cases an increase of calories as people tried to get more bang for their buck.

And honestly if you think it’s possible to design an attractive, practically sized and easy to read menu board that shows the information for literally hundreds of different possible combinations that I invite you to try.

Also if you are so feeble you need the government to make laws like this to protect you from yourself I don’t know how you’ve survived this long.

Perhaps they could waive the need to have a calorie count in place of having an additional tax put on the pizzas? Then it wouldn’t matter if people could see the calories or not because having a higher price, like .30 – .40, would cause 5% of people to not eat pizza in the first place.

Oh, come on. The real reason they don’t want to list calories anywhere is that nobody that cares about their weight would eat pizza ever again! Here’s a shocker for you all: Pizza is full of fat. The cheese alone is bad enough fat-wise, but you add pepperoni and sausage to that? I wouldn’t be surprised if pizza is at least 67% fat, calorie-wise. The crust is low-quality bleached flour, and it’s very glutinous (absolute death for someone with Celiac) and it’s overall very high in sodium (even worse than most fast food). Bottom line: If people were made fully aware of how poor pizza is nutritionally, they’d stop eating it, and pizza chains obviously don’t want that!

You know damned well what’s going to happen *if* the pizza places are forced to display calorie counts..

They would display the calorie counts on a ‘Per Serving’ basis. Not per pizza, not per slice..per *serving*. (and a ‘serving’ at one of these places would be something stupid, like per 2/7th of a slice, just to make the math hard).

It’s the same with ‘serving sizes’ on a bag of chips. It’s pathetic. 1 serving = 12 chips. Who the hell would stop there? That’s what these places would do: use unrealisic serving sizes ending in a number which would be to difficult to do quick math on.

Otherwise, if a person saw that their pizza meal consists of 3-4 days of calories, they probably wouldn’t order it.

I stop at 6 now that I’ve decided my years-long vacation from dieting has gone on long enough and it’s time to get back into shape. Now I can’t imagine eating more than an ounce. But people on average eat a lot more and yes, a 20 oz soda is sold as a serving even though it’s more like 2, for example.

I don’t understand why they can’t do what McDonald’s used to do which is hand out a pamphlet that says calories in each item and then add the toppings on a separate section. So start with cheese as the base and then have the toppings separate.